The Expelled by Mois Benarroch Page A

another fiction. Or am I afraid of reality, I'm afraid it will eat me and devour me, or I'm afraid to start suffering from schizophrenia, like in the movie about the mathematician who won the Nobel Prize, Nash, who creates an entire parallel life and believes in its existence, until he discovers that all that world does not exist, nor the offices, nor the people in them. Sometimes I think that everyone is living in absolute schizophrenia and that one day we will wake up to find that planes don't exist and that it's pure imagination of the masses, for a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, that it's all fiction. And I should stop this habit of counting the number of words every fifteen minutes, and the back-ups in Gmail keep surprising me, I shouldn't have called this file Gabrielle, and in the end it's not even going to be the name of the book, maybe it'll be The Expelled, and maybe it'll be something else, The Bus, or a different name. Phone. I see Gabriele on the screen of my cellphone, I must be careful not to get it wrong, I should call her junior, sometimes I leave my phone around and it's my wife, with the double l’s, who answers it.
    “How's your wife's cooking?”
    “What?”
    “Yeah,” junior says, “you've told me nothing about her.”
    “And what interests you is to know if she's a good cook or not?”
    “Well, it's something.”
    “I like her cooking, but she burns a lot of stuff, I guess I love burnt food. That's why I like it. Well, not too burned, but just a little, like rice that sticks to tomato sauce or fried eggs, a little burned, she is always doing a thousand things and she forgets and she burns things, although sometimes the food is completely burned...”
    “I don't need that many details, it's enough. See you later.”
    We just spoke and minutes later my wife opens the bedroom door and checks if I'm sleeping, I close my eyes and pretend to be half snoring. She goes away. Apparently to watch a movie. I hope the junior doesn't call me on my cell again. I turn it off. I think I should change the whole story because I can't convince a reader by telling him that everything is plausible and that it all happened to me, he's going to think I'm a moron, I just can't do that, I must convince him by using a technique and not by saying and repeating a thousand times that it's something that really happened to me and that the reader should believe me, the critics are going to rip me to pieces, tear me apart, criticize me, they're all anti-Semitic. This is how you resolve everything, I write what I want, good, bad, and if the critics don't like it it's because they are anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism is no longer what it used to be. And if it's in Israel I say they're anti-Moroccan, and they are, at least many of the critics are. Well, those who hate me before reading me. I must stop thinking about it, about critics and readers. Didn't I say that a writer mustn't think about the readers? But I also already said this time I have to sell, if I don't sell I'll be homeless, not much, just a few, about ten thousand copies a year, I can live with that and keep writing. It's not too much to ask for or is it. And then comes a brat and with his first book, which is quite bad but that talks about incest or a crime, with that it becomes a bestseller and he can keep writing more bad books his entire life, and I'm here working my ass off for thirty years to end up selling nothing. I say it because I feel that my book will sell this time and it's the last time I can say these things and be convinced. It's going to be published on a good day, on the Jewish holiday Tu BiShvat, on the 22 of January, Tu BiShvat is on a full moon and trees are planted in celebration. Perhaps I should plant a tree. I finally fall asleep.
    I wake up very early, before six. I prepare an orange juice for my wife and another one for me. She wakes up and asks me to help her fill up a form for social security. I say no. She gets nervous. She